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WASHINGTON — In a bid to stem a surge in human resistance to certain antibiotics, U.S. regulators announced new guidelines to phase out their use as a growth enhancer in livestock.

The Food and Drug Administration said the antibiotics still could be used to treat illnesses in animals raised for meat but should otherwise be pared back over the next three years under a voluntary program to keep them out of the human food supply.

Although voluntary, the agency said it expects drugmakers to fully adhere to the new guidelines and announced yesterday that two of the biggest purveyors of these antibiotics already had agreed to narrow their use.

Doctors and hospitals increasingly have become worried in recent years by new strains of bacteria that cannot be controlled by a wide range of current antibiotics. Part of the suspected reason for the emergence of these “superbugs” is that people who have eaten meat that contained antibiotics develop resistance to the drugs as bacteria mutate to thwart them.

“Because antimicrobial drug use in both humans and animals can contribute to the development of antimicrobial resistance, it is important to use these drugs only when medically necessary,” the FDA said in a release.

In guidance issued yesterday, the FDA asked global drugmakers and animal-health companies including Eli Lilly & Co. and Zoetis to revise labels of medically important antibiotics by removing references to use in animal production.

Once companies remove farm-production uses of their antibiotics from drug labels, it would become illegal for those drugs to be used for those purposes, Deputy FDA Commissioner Michael Taylor said. The agency said about 25 animal-health companies could be affected by the guidelines, especially Lilly and Zoetis.

Although the program is meant to be voluntary, Taylor said the FDA would be able to take regulatory action against companies that fail to comply.

The FDA’s “final guidance” also brings the drugs under oversight of veterinarians by changing the over-the-counter status of the products.

The FDA said it will require animal-pharmaceutical companies to notify the agency within three months of their intent to adopt its strategy. The companies would then have three years to complete the transition process.

Critics said yesterday that the guidelines give drugmakers too much discretion in policing their own use of antibiotics.

Morningstar analyst David Krempa said the FDA issued similar voluntary guidelines in April 2012, meant to limit the use of important antibiotics in food-producing animals, but they appear to have been largely ignored by farmers.

He said compliance with the FDA’s latest set of voluntary guidelines could be equally spotty.

“Compliance will be tough because all the farmers and meat producers know these products increase the size of their animals,” Krempa said. “They can continue to use them and just say there’s a disease going through their herds.”

But even if antibiotics use in livestock comes down, Krempa said it would be only a “small negative” for Zoetis because it, like other animal-health companies, sells such a wide range of products for both livestock and pets.

The FDA said it already had received support for the new measures from Zoetis and Elanco, a unit of Eli Lilly, which sell a large percentage of the products that eventually will be phased out.

Elanco said in a statement that it would voluntarily narrow use of antibiotics used to treat both humans and animals “only to therapeutic purposes of treating, controlling and preventing diseases in animals under the supervision of a veterinarian.”